Kenny Killed Us...

As mentioned at the conclusion of the previous entry, Kevin Keegan‘s replacement in the Liverpool FC team for the 1977-78 football season was Kenny Dalglish, on whose purchase the club didn’t stint in their pursuit of continued success, as might be gleaned from this portrait published within the pages of the match programme for the Wrexham v Liverpool Football League Cup quarter-final tie played at the Racecourse Ground on Tuesday, 17th January 1978.

This was a match at which I was fortunate to be present, a big occasion and distinct memory in a season of much excitement and great days/nights at Wrexham that season, competing that evening against the reigning domestic and European club champions. Alas, Liverpool and Kenny Dalglish in particular, were  to poop Wrexham’s giant-killing party by inflicting a 3 – 1 defeat not least courtesy of Dalglish scoring all three of his team’s goals, and here the Seventies project continues with a representation of the man celebrating one of his hat-trick during the course of the 90 minutes of the match. As Liverpool supporter John Peel‘s favourite player of the era, there’s thus a link between this and a previous subject to be featured in the project. As also mentioned before, Youtube footage of the highlights of the match and the damage done by Dalglish, is available).

‘Kenny Dalglish, Wrexham v Liverpool, 16/01/78’

Graphite and putty eraser on Seawhite cartidge paper/42 x 30cm (A3)

A tangible souvenir of the occasion, a portal to a variety of memories, here’s an image of the front cover of the match programme and also the rear, featuring the team line-ups, both full of fine players: if only Dixie McNeil, goalscorer par excellence, hadn’t been cup-tied and thus unavailable to represent Wrexham, though…(we can still dream of what might have been).

Film and Football

Continuing with the Seventies project and another selection of drawings, the latest to be processed with reference to memories retained from growing up.

First up are a pair of stills from the film (movie) ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’, which I recall seeing on television for the first time (it became what seemed like an annual event for a period of a few early-Eighties’ years) in 1979, sometime around the August Bank Holiday which was also the time John Peel, as featured previously, was mentioning his 40th birthday. I obviously enjoyed the film a great deal, enough to return to watch it numerous times, and can remember in particular its sun-bleached aesthetic and those scenes near the conclusion of the tale featuring a car journey between Clint Eastwood‘s ‘Thunderbolt’ and [spoiler alert] a dying ‘Lightfoot’ (Jeff Bridges, who became a real favourite actor of mine).

'Thunderbolt and Lightfoot #1'

graphite and putty eraser on Seawhite cartridge paper/A3 (42 x 30cm)

'Thunderbolt and Lightfoot #2'

graphite and putty eraser on Seawhite cartridge paper/A3 (42 x 30cm)

Next, a drawing sourced from an original image that graced a number of the front covers of Wrexham FC‘s match programmes towards the latter part of 1977 and which features the central figure of Bobby Shinton celebrating the single goal that defeated Bristol City in a Football League Cup Third Round tie played at the Racecourse Ground on Wednesday 26th October, a match I attended in the company of my father and more than 10,000 other spectators. Shinton, obviously the goalscorer, is accompanied by a couple of teammates, the late Johns Roberts and Lyons, with the dejected opponent being, I think, Gerry Sweeney.

'Bobby Shinton (Wrexham v Bristol City, 26/10/1977)'

graphite and putty eraser on Seawhite cartridge paper/A3 (42 x 30cm)

These were the great days when Third Division Wrexham were bona fide giant killers – Bristol City were enjoying a brief period in the First Division at this time – and would reach the quarter final stage of both the FA and League Cups during the 1977-78 season, the club’s most successful ever when they went on the be crowned champions of Division Three and earn promotion to the heady heights of English football’s second tier for the first and only time in their history before adding the Welsh Cup to the list of honours. The Racecourse became littered with the scalps of the ‘big’ clubs – Bristol City again and then Newcastle United were both treated to 3-goal drubbings in FA Cup tie replays in the new year – and it took the might of European champions Liverpool and a referee-assisted Arsenal to end those glorious cup runs, memories of which remain vivid, welcome as they are in these times of the club plumbing the nadir of their almost 100 years in the national league structure (I could go on…).

The particular significance of the Bobby Shinton drawing is the fact that I made a version of it back in the day, which was published in the art section of the children’s pages of the local (NE Wales) ‘Evening Leader’ newspaper – unfortunately, no tangible evidence of this remains but my parents did retain a cutting of an earlier artistic effort submitted to and published in the same ‘paper, which has subsequently come into my possession and here, accordingly, introduces/precedes the next drawing, one of my then-favourite footballer, Kevin Keegan, pictured here representing Liverpool FC in 1976, when the original drawing was made. Of particular and curious footballing interest, 1976-77 was Keegan’s last season at Liverpool before departing for new continental challenges at SV Hamburg – by the following season, he had been replaced by a player who went on to even greater achievements and legend at Liverpool, Kenny Dalglish, who downed Wrexham with a hat-trick at the Racecourse, another special occasion I was present to witness (and of which there is Youtube footage – never mind the game, look at the state of that vintage Seventies’ pitch!).

(note the Kevin Keegan drawing is credited to a ‘James Roudey’, which is not a misprint but an interpretation by a member of the newspaper staff based on what was obviously my illegible handwriting even then – how typical that I should find a way of taking something of the gloss off a public achievement!)

'Kevin Keegan 1976'

graphite and putty eraser on cartridge paper/A4 (30 x 21cm)

Overdue Update

Continuing with the Seventies’ project, a selection of nostalgic subject matter represented in the form of graphite drawings, another process of which I’m fond and harks back in particular to the decade in question, when drawing was my creative activity and pencil or felt pen was my medium of choice.

The first drawing features an action shot from the FA Cup Final of 1974, played at Wembley Stadium in London and contested between Liverpool and Newcastle United, the former running out convincing 3 – 0 winners over opponents who failed to live up to expectations and hype (‘Supermac’ amongst others who proved to be rather ordinary on the day). This in fact was the first live televised football match I watched or took any interest in, the latter to the extent that I made a drawing at the time, in the moment, in felt pen, being also the first drawing  I have any recollection of making, in felt pen and concentrating particularly on rendering the thousands of faces/heads in the crowd (the attendance was 100,000 – the capacity of the ground), which obviously impressed/amazed my then 9-year-old self to the exclusion of much else, something borne out by a memory of my father, when appraising my efforts later, enquiring whether perhaps Newcastle didn’t sport vertically-striped shirts rather than the hoops I’d represented!

Anyway, here we observe Liverpool’s Kevin Keegan, probably the star of the match, hurdling a tackle by Newcastle’s number 3 Alan Kennedy (who later played for Liverpool with considerable distinction, including the scoring of two European Cup-winning goals), with the latter’s teammate Terry Hibbitt also in attendance. Admire, if nothing else, the luxuriousness of those sideburns, very much the facial hair du jour.

‘1974 FA Cup Final’

graphite and putty eraser on Seawhite cartridge paper/30 x 42cm (A3)

Next is (re)presented the mighty John Peel, the late night Radio One DJ who brought punk, post-punk and so much other music to our eager young ears, desperate for inspiration, in the late Seventies and then for a further 25 years until his untimely death in 2004 (this very day marking the anniversary of, indeed, so here’s a personal tribute). I recall I started listening to Peel in the summer of 1979, very probably at a school friend’s insistent recommendation, and could write at great length about  the influence he had, in not just musical but broader cultural and philosophical terms, but for now here’s the drawing, of the man at a mixing desk.

‘John Peel c.1979’

graphite and putty eraser on Seawhite cartridge paper/30 x 42cm (A3)

Finally for this update, another figure from the world of broadcasting, and ITV’s Saturday afternoon ‘World of Sport’, the iconic and legendary Dickie Davies, at his dapper and groomed finest. ‘World of Sport’ was something I remember being on TV at my paternal grandparents’ home even before I started watching it myself once I’d quickly developed an obsession with football (see above), beginning as it did with the preview magazine ‘On the Ball’ and covering the afternoon until the final scores were in – as something of a more louche relation to the BBC’s ‘Grandstand’, all manner of more obscure sports were featured, most iconically perhaps wrestling, and these are the memories that resonate down the years, with Dickie the genial host. Of course, many of us British viewers will also recall Benny Hill’s spoofs of Dickie Davies, but here’s the man himself, seated at ‘home’ in the World of Sport studio with its also iconic logo.

‘Dickie Davies: World of Sport’

graphite and putty eraser on Seawhite cartridge paper/30 x 42cm (A3)

More Nostalgia

'Seventies Project 3: Death Disco 7-inch Picture Sleeve'

oil on canvas/25 x 25cm/September 2019

More from the 1970s-themed project, with another object from the decade providing grist to the painting mill. On this occasion, the source material is, in effect, an item of packaging material, being the cardboard ‘picture sleeve’ housing an object within, a seven-inch vinyl 45rpm ‘single’ featuring Public Image Ltd’s ‘Death Disco’ as its A-side, coupled with ‘No Birds Do Sing’ on the reverse. Dating from 1979, this item thus signifies and encapsulates that latter part of the designated period when I’d reached my nascent post-punk music-obsessive stage that has endured and remained influential since, not least in the current circumstance.

Back in the day, as an aspiring artist/graphic designer and as something I’d started to do often, given the source material I was being attracted to, acquiring and becoming familiar with, this is undoubtedly a record cover I would have copied in drawing form, both the strange, compellingly gruesome image and the text, probably on a number of occasions, so the present painting as made constitutes an update of this process, this time presenting an object of a certain time-worn vintage that happens to feature an image and text upon its surface as a still life. Both the image, which research has unfortunately failed to establish an original artist to give credit to, and the music contained within, particularly ‘Death Disco’ itself, remain, forty years on, striking, harsh and uncompromising, suitably complementary in appearance and sound, and they provide a potent link back to their time.

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What We Did On Our Holidays

Today the opposite of tomato is more or less a wide slice of the action.

Beginning with a continuation of the ‘Spectral Stone Circles’ and featuring numbers 2 to 5 in that particular series, which, following the initial snowswept example, has taken a turn into misty environments that are best described as being not necessarily invented or generic but, rather, based on and adapted from observation of or sketches (sometimes historical) of actual locations, for example a local woodland. The circles themselves are composed of stone chippings approximately 8 - 10cm in height, collected on various perambulations, chosen for efficacy and arranged in circular form on the back lawn at home and photographed/sketched in situ, thus being both invented and real as, in effect, are the resulting paintings. Small in scale (all being 12” x 16”), the surfaces are all considerably more thinly painted than had become the norm with previous landscape/’woodscape’ subject matter although hopefully retain certain physical attributes that establish them as paintings.

'Spectral Stone Circle #2'

oil on canvas/16 x 12"/June 2019

'Spectral Stone Circle #3'

oil on canvas/16 x 12"/July 2019

'Spectral Stone Circle #4'

oil on canvas/16 x 12"/July 2019

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'Spectral Stone Circle #5'

oil on canvas/16 x 12"/July 2019

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The next painting continues with the ‘invented’ stone circle theme but, following a short break in the Shropshire countryside, departs from the ‘spectral’ and instead presents something that might be said to tend towards the picturesque, in keeping with the bucolic setting, which is in fact a view of the approximately 15 miles-distant Wrekin from an empty field in the Pulverbatch area, sketched on the spot which then provided suitable reference for the painting to proceed once back in the studio at home.

'Imaginary Stone Circle: a Field in Shropshire'

oil on canvas10016 x 75cm/August 2019

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As summer began to dwindle, I then had the notion to begin a nostalgic project based on subject matter familiar from a 1970s British childhood, intended to encompass anything that might be redolent of the period, beginning with a couple of objects that are further grist to the Uglowian mill in providing different materials and surfaces to represent in the individual forms of a carved wooden antelope and one of the Homepride ‘Fred’ flour-grader figures that have made numerous appearances in paintings already this year. These again are small-format works with the objects being represented at more-or-less life size.

'Seventies Project 1: Wooden Antelope'

oil on canvas/35 x 25cm/August 2019

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'Seventies Project 2: Homepride Fred'

oil on canvas/35 x 25cm/August 2019

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Another Dip Into the Past...

Returning to the stone circle as subject matter, and another painting, after the recent 'Castlerigg' example, based on historical sketches and a particular photograph taken on location during a snowstorm.

The circle is not, like Castlerigg, an ancient monument, but, rather, a more modern structure, erected in the 1960s on the top field in Flint, North Wales, to commemorate the staging of the 'Eisteddfod' cultural festival - a feast movable all over Wales - in the town, and is composed of twelve standing stones arranged in circular form with a further collection of stone laid in the centre, in the style of a plinth with irregular 'steps' on all four sides. The tallest of the standing stones (probably the slightly most distant one as represented, at the left-hand edge of the plinth) is perhaps 6 feet in height.

Growing up there, and in the top end of town, it's something - a thing, an object, composed of objects, a static arrangement like a still life in the landscape - that I encountered on very many occasions, indeed daily over a period of years, more often in passing, sometimes to stop and contemplate. At various points, I photographed and drew the circle, and it is these records as they exist that inform this particular painted image, which thus embodies both specific and more general memories.

'Spectral Stone Circle #1: Snowstorm'

oil on canvas/16" x 20"/June 2019

The size of the painting is rather smaller on this occasion, a deliberate attempt at experimentation with questions of scale, and, whilst retaining evidence of its brush-marked, hand-made nature, has less thickly physical a surface than the larger Castlerigg predecessor, not least in an attempt to communicate something of a 'spectral' nature which is an idea that I'm considering exploring as a theme from an interest in the nebulous concept of 'hauntology', something introduced into my frame of reference via music and related artwork (primarily the wonders of the Moon Wiring Club and the Blank Workshop) about ten years ago and which continues to exercise a particular fascination.